LESSONS LEARNED FROM 5/3/1

I previously reviewed “5/3/1 Forever” and have announced in many other posts how much I am a fan of the program and Jim’s philosophy.  That having been said, up until recently, I had been co-opting 5/3/1 principles into my own training to suit my specific goals.  After my most recent competition in April of 2017, I had enough downtime that I figured I might as well run some 5/3/1 programs legit and see what happens.  From that time, I ran “Building the Monolith” (which I have reviewed here), a leader and anchor cycle of “God is a Beast” and 3 leaders of “SVR II” before moving on to my own training approach which once again steals from 5/3/1.  I have sense observed some fantastic growth in my own training along with some paradigm shifting, and figured this was as good a time as any to share what lessons I’ve learned and what takeaways you may experience.

1: You don’t need to set PRs in training all the time

Dude, Kaz, we still have 2 more sets

One of the big critiques of 5/3/1 Forever is that “the PR sets are gone!”  What actually happened is that programs have built in leader and anchor cycles, and the PR sets don’t happen till you reach the latter, but in either case, you spend a LOT more time working in the 5 rep range now than you did with 5/3/1 first edition.  I’ll admit that I approached this with trepidation at first as well, because the meathead in me said that, if I’m ALWAYS doing sets of 5, then only the final week of the program is where I’ll really work hard, because the first 2 weeks will be too light.

And then I ended up setting a lifetime PR on the press during the anchor of God is a Beast. 

Solid PR on back bending too

I’m not going to pretend to understand it, but Jim is some sort of alchemist when it comes to training, and the way he structures the programs work in such a way that, when you follow them, you get stronger.  It seems all that time spent grinding away on the sets of 5 over a few cycles sets you up for some big results when you actually go to push for PRs.  In fact, I’m STILL reaping the benefits of this set-up, and despite being now 9 weeks removed from a 5/3/1 program proper, I am smashing PRs in the press every time I train it.  The non-PR sets are where strength is built, and the PR sets are where it is realized.

2: Full body workouts are viable at any level

Although you don't need to do the whole thing all at once

Maybe I’m being presumptuous with that statement as I’m not “advanced”, but odds are, if you’re reading my blog, you aren’t either, so this works for you.  I thought for sure I was beyond this point in my training, and so I used an upper/lower split for years, specifically ala 5/3/1 first edition with a day for benching, squatting, pressing and deadlifting.  However, Building the Monolith got me back into full body training, and Jim’s approach to assistance work has you train the entire body every day, even if the focus is on one movement.  In turn, frequency of muscle group training is high, as is total volume, yet it works in a fashion that is completely recoverable.  Instead of having 1 day where I absolutely hammered my delts, I’d hit them 4-6 times in a week, and get in even more volume.

This has also been a boon for training for strongman competitions, as before I would need to figure out how to fit event training into my 4 days a week of lifting.  Now, I’ve learned how to consolidate my lifting into 3 full body days so that I have more time in the week to focus on event work.  I still get in adequate volume and frequency in lifting, but don’t need to make events an “afterthought”.

3: You can train the same muscle groups many times in a row

In this case, you train none of them all the time

Similar to the above, I was stuck in the mentality that, after you train a muscle group, you have to let it rest for 48ish hours, because of reasons.  This mentality forced my training to be pretty restrictive, and many times my schedule would get chaotic.  However, with 5/3/1’s approach to assistance work being that the full body gets worked every time you train, I found out that it was totally possible to recover training the same muscle groups back to back to back, so long as volume and recovery were accounted for.  Yeah; if you do a full on hour workout just for your shoulders, you shouldn’t touch them again for a few days, but if all you did was 50-100 reps of some raises, you can come back the next day and so some presses and be fine.  And in the end, your total volume for the week will be about the same as if you hammered them for an hour on one day; it’s just a different approach.  This opens up a lot more options for training flexibility and more creative approaches to assistance work.

4: You can’t push supplemental work and main work hard at the same time

I swear to God I will pistol whip the next person that calls this an "accessory exercise"

This was the big revelation in Jim’s “leaders and anchors” approach to training, and something I never wanted to admit to, but was the absolute truth.  The main work in the program tends to be those lifts we are specifically focusing on; for a powerlifting, the big 3, for a strongman, upcoming competition lifts, etc.  We push those lifts hard whenever we’re trying to improve those specific lifts, but when that happens, it means that the supplemental lifts, those additional lifts that DRIVE up the mainlifts, need to throttle back.  Volume or intensity needs to be reduced in order to accommodate for how hard we’re pushing the top stuff.  So what do we do when we want to push the supplemental lifts?  We throttle  back on the main work, hitting hard and heavy but not super taxing sets in order to maintain our ability to move weight and our technique, but still allowing us time to backfill with more work in the supplemental portion.  This is also why, once the leaders are done and one moves onto the anchors, they get to experience so much growth; because resting on the mainwork and pushing the supplemental stuff laid down the foundation for this growth.